Some more progress on the Hein. This is probably going to cost me a penalty, but I find myself taking this build seriously, despite the quality of the cardstock. I'm taking considerably more time than I initially figured on, what with all the fiddling trying to get as good a fit as I can.
The front section of the fuselage is a bit different from most, as it has a petal-type design to build in the compound curve of the nose section. Taken slowly, it's not too difficult to do. I'm going to take the extra time to factor in allowing the propellor to turn.
As you can see from the fuselage in the background, I'm having my own color matching disaster at the joins. The first attempt came out too green....now, it's too brown. I suppose I'm going to have to take the fuselage down to the hobby shop and see if they have any paints that will give a better match. However, I can always claim that it is just weathering, and it's really oily corrosion at the panel edges.
I'm starting to suspect it is a lost cause trying to convert Maly kits to joiner strip construction. The butt-joined segments let the designer get away with murder with respect to sloppy fits and panel line misalignments between the skin segments. I gave up trying to make the center and rear section join as originally intended. I wound up going to a hybrid technique....I cut down the joiner strip, turning it into some tabs on the bottom of the fuselage, and putting in the upper half of the former into the rear fuselage section. During the dry fit, I was able to get a reasonable alignment of the panel lines, and the contour mismatch between segments is located down at the bottom of the fuselage, where most people won't be looking too hard.
The final photo in this post shows a neat little tool I found at Michaels in the Boy Scout pine-box derby display. It is a drill mandrel for turning wheels. The screw is long enough that it should accept a stackup of cardboard disks just fine. The hole size required in the wheel is larger than we normally want in cardmodeling, but that can be compensated by bushing the hole with a bit of 1/16 inch OD tubing....one more item for the shopping list for the next hobby shop visit.
As a post-script....for some reason, I am having to use Firefox in order to make the photo insertion work. Explorer is preventing the attachment popup from popping up, even though the popup blocker is set to allow popups on the site. Any thoughts on how to beat Explorer into submission so I can quit changing browsers whenever I want to make a post?